U INDIVIDUALITY AND AGE 21 



that it exercises on our thought, should put us on our 

 guard against it. The attraction it has for us proves well 

 enough that it gives satisfaction to an innate inclination. 

 But, as will be seen further on, the intellectual tendencies 

 innate to-day, which life must have created in the course 

 of its evolution, are not at all meant to supply us with 

 an explanation of life: they have something else to do. 



Any attempt to distinguish between an artificial and a 

 natural system, between the dead and the living, runs 

 counter to this tendency at once. Thus it happens that 

 we find it equally difficult to imagine that the organized 

 has duration and that the unorganized has not. When 

 we say that the state of an artificial system depends ex- 

 clusively on its state at the moment before, does it not 

 seem as if we were bringing time in, as if the system had 

 something to do with real duration? And, on the other 

 hand, though the whole of the past goes into the making 

 of the living being's present moment, does not organic 

 memory press it into the moment immediately before the 

 present, so that the moment immediately before becomes 

 the sole cause of the present one? — To speak thus is to 

 ignore the cardinal difference between concrete time, along 

 which a real system develops, and that abstract time which 

 enters into our speculations on artificial systems. What 

 does it mean, to say that the state of an artificial system 

 depends on what it was at the moment immediately before? 

 There is no instant immediately before another instant; 

 there could not be, any more than there could be one 

 mathematical point touching another. The instant "im- 

 mediately before" is, in reality, that which is connected 

 with the present instant by the interval dt. All that you 

 mean to say, therefore, is that the present state of the 

 system is defined by equations into which differential 

 coefficients enter, such as ds\dt, dv\dt, that is to say, at 



